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When studying the life of Jacob in the Bible, Leah is a character that we often don’t pay great attention to. She was Jacob’s wife; not by her choice or his choice. She was pushed into marriage by her dad to the arms of a man that didn’t want her. Jacob was interested in Rachel, Leah’s younger sister. This story is found in Genesis 29:31-35. As I read this story again, a lot of things started coming out to me. Things that made me feel empathy for Leah.

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Everyone knows an Anton Sukhinski. He was the nutty guy who lived outside of town in a small, wobbly shack. Sukhinski was considered the local weirdo, and people constantly made fun of this “village idiot.” But when the Nazis rolled into Poland, Sukhinski was the only man in the town of Zborow who would help runaway Jews. Sukhinski immediately took in a sixteen-year-old girl, keeping her hidden in his cellar. Next, he offered protection to the Zeigers, a family he knew from before the war. When the Zeigers accepted sanctuary, they brought along a family friend and a young orphan girl, raising Sukhinski’s refugee count to seven.

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Nietzsche claimed that if men took God seriously, they would still be burning heretics at the stake. In the same spirit, one supposes, are the notions that if men really cherished moral truth, they would suppress all beliefs that they considered wrong, and that if men still cared about the sanctity of the marriage bed, they would go back to making adulterers wear the scarlet A.Today two different groups of people agree with conditional statements of this sort. In the first group are the ordinary bigots, who are always among us. The second are a kind of modern backlash—call it the reaction—found principally among the “cultural elite.” For instance, whereas the bigots respond to Nietzsche’s conditional by saying, “Yes, that’s why we should burn heretics,” the reactionaries respond to it by saying, “No, that’s why we should suppress the public expression of belief in God.”These reactionaries claim to love tolerance, but, misunderstanding it, they strangle it in their embrace.

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Can We Let Them Rest in Peace?
Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolution that brought Communism to Russia 100 years ago, died in 1924. Since then, his body has been on display in a mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square. Scientists, using chemical baths and processes, have preserved the empty shell of his corpse—its brain and all its organs have been removed. Every now and then, they must “freshen up” the corpse with another treatment. Earlier this year, for the centennial, Lenin was fitted with a new set of clothes. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin favored burying Lenin. That didn’t happen for various reasons. The government refused to pay to maintain the corpse, but private donors stepped in. In 2011, in an online poll by Vladimir Putin’s Russia United Party, 70 percent of respondents thought Lenin should be buried. Yet in 2001 Putin had opposed reburial as implying that generations of good Soviet citizens had supported false values. In 2016, the government set aside 13 million rubles to maintain Lenin’s corpse. Lenin’s ideas about Communism, though now discredited, still linger in the shadows. Similarly, his corpse is still displayed in public, for it cannot be retired without the admission of grave failures. This all reminds me of Charles Darwin.

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Another case of someone who doesn’t know theology, trying to be a theologian.

By now, plenty has been written on the issue of Mike Pence’s wife teaching at a Christian school that supposedly “bans” (the preferred word of the major news outlets, but not really accurate) LGBTQ students.

For those on the cultural left, this is a monumental and stunning discovery. Indeed, we are told (ironically, by the Huffington Post) that the Huffington Post “broke” the story—implying that a remarkable scandal had been uncovered.

Thankfully, many have pointed out that this whole “scandal” is much ado about nothing. There are thousands of Christian schools around the country just like the one that Karen Pence teaches at. And they are all doing something rather unremarkable: they are merely teaching the historical Christian position about sexuality.

But what is remarkable about such public discussions, is that everyone suddenly becomes a Christian theologian. Even people who typically have no association with Christianity are quick to don the theologian’s hat and give a lecture on what Christians really believe.